Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Sunday Roast: San Francisco

I grew up just across the San Francisco bay, in a town called Alameda. My dad was in the Navy, and he managed to allow us to live in one place for about seven years, by alternating being stationed on the base at Alameda and being stationed on the USS Coral Sea. At that time, it was the longest time I’d lived anywhere in my life!

Watching this video, it made me remember how much I loved the Bay Area. So much history, beautiful scenery, and amazing weather. I remember watching from across the bay as half of the Transamerica Pyramid was built — the top half, obviously. 🙂

I left Alameda in 1989 — having moved back there as a married woman with one child, and another on the way — moving to Salem, Oregon just a few months before the Loma Prieta earthquake. The only reason I had the TV on that afternoon was because of the World Series game between the A’s and the Giants. Even though I’m not a baseball fan, I had to watch this particular series!

I walked out to the living room to see how they could possibly have such a quiet lead-in to the first game. That’s when I saw raw footage of the Cypress freeway collapsed in on itself, and just stood there in shock. I’d driven out of the Bay Area just a few months before, on the lower deck of that freeway, and I knew what that road was like at rush hour — packed. The Portland news guy was narrating the raw footage, and I was going absolutely batshit, because he just didn’t understand that the Cypress was a double-decked structure. A lot of people died on that freeway the day of the earthquake, but a mere fraction of the number that would have died, if not for the historic World Series starting that afternoon.

I haven’t been back there in over 25 years, but I’d love to visit San Francisco and the East Bay again. I’d drive around the narrow streets of my old hometown, even though the base has been closed for many years, and the military housing I lived in is gone. I noticed that the Myth Busters are making use of the old runways and my high school pool, so that’s pretty awesome. Then I’d drive across the bridges, down Lombard Street, catch a cable car to China Town (if they’re still running), visit Coit Tower, where the ladies of the Officer’s Wives Club — led my my mom — hung a giant yellow ribbon, to welcome home my dad’s ship after the war, and I’d walk around Fisherman’s Wharf. From what I could see on the video, it looks like they’ve spiffed up the piers and wharf area quite a bit. Weird. I liked it as it was.

Well, enjoy the video. It brought back a lot of memories for me, as you can tell.

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53 thoughts on “Sunday Roast: San Francisco”

Starting Sunday with Sarah…’Judge for yourself: Did Sarah Palin get into Aunty Peggy Noonan’s jar of Magic Dolphin Pills before her speech in Denver this week?’

She opens with a joke about the size of Colorado mountains, saying they look like hills compared to Alaska’s mountains? I can see that joke maybe in Appalachia, but Colorado has some really big mountains. It’s kind of their thing. Oh and really good way to play to your audience, get into a pissing contest about how where you are from is better than where you are at.

Shuffle down to the 8:03 mark — it’s worth it just to hear her rant about how God doesn’t drive parked cars.

Colorado has, iirc, 25 peaks that are 14,000 ft or higher. Alaska has the one tallest peak in North America plus Sarah Palin who, if her bullshit was piled up would admittedly whip most any mountain range anywhere.

Fortunately, I didn’t know she was in Denver this week. Didn’t know, in fact, that she’d ever even heard of Colorado (she can’t see it from her window, so . . .). I do puzzle over one thing: why the fuck does ANYONE anywhere give a shit what she has to say, much less give her airtime? Might as well play the sound of a fly buzzing — at least in that there’s a subliminal intelligence.

I have trouble watching her. Stupid hurts. In fact, even if she was scheduled to speak, appropriately naked and on national tv at a nudist camp, I honestly think Teh Stupid would keep me from tuning in. It’s far easier to read transcripts where the dumb is in black and white and not skin and nail polish with screeching voice.

Cool. There was some confusion in the past over which ear lobe a single earring was worn in, and what it signified depending on what side of the continent one was on; but in this day and age of runaway flesh lancing I doubt if I need to be concerned anymore.
Beyond that I’ve reached a point where I’m less concerned about a lot of things…

Your existential, deep thought for the day. William Boyd, in The New Statesman (which I can’t link to cuz unresponsive script freezes me):

“[W]hatever the nature of a faith in a supernatural being, or beings, and whatever its unprovable postulates, I am convinced that what makes our species unique … is that we know we are trapped in time, caught briefly between these two eternities of darkness, the prenatal darkness and the posthumous one”:

“The prison of time is spherical and without exits,” Nabokov says. What to do in the face of this universal, inescapable penal servitude? My own feeling – and this again is what makes us human – is that we all yearn for one thing. Just as it’s hard-wired into our consciousness that we live between two eternities of darkness, so we search for some factor to alleviate and compensate for that brutal reality.

And the compensation we seek, I believe, is love. We want to love and we want to be loved, every single one of us. As the song says: “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn/Is just to love and be loved in return.” That’s what makes our sojourn in the time-prison bearable – more than bearable: redemptive – life-enhancing, time-evading. If you’re lucky enough to experience that emotion then you’ll have savoured the best, the ultimate, that the human predicament can offer.”

NBC host David Gregory was forced to issue a correction at the end of his weekly Meet the Press program on Sunday after a United Nations official confronted him for using a unconfirmed Israeli video that allegedly showed Hamas shooting rockets from a UN school.

I clearly remember taking a tour of the Randolph Technology College in Vermont when I was in 9th grade, my parents had an inside track there to get me in when I graduated from high school. Every student I saw had a slide rule in a leather holster on their belts. I was terrified and decided then that I was not going to go to ANY college, ever.